Crazy alert!

In the last week or so we've had a crazy man in the library. He comes in nearly every day and spends literally all day on the computer working on some kind of complicated-looking spreadsheet, so obviously he has some skillz. Most of the time he's pretty quiet (although he clears his throat an awful lot), but every now and then he starts talking loudly to himself about cell phones and surveillance, so I guess he's got some kind of conspiracy theory that "they" are spying on him through cell phones.

When he starts getting agitated, of course the other customers complain. But he seems to be aware when he needs to calm himself down: he leaves his computer and goes all the way back in the corner of the stacks and lies down on the floor for a few minutes. He always manages to get back to his computer before it times out, though. Must have some kind of sixth sense, 'cause I don't think he owns a watch. I've seen him on the floor and even though we have a "no sleeping" policy, I don't really want to confront him 'cause, well for starters, he's crazy, AND I think he's actually doing something that helps him be LESS crazy, at least for the next little while. So, you know, he's dealing with it.

This evening a guy came up and said he thought he saw this guy on America's Most Wanted, so of course I looked him up right away but didn't see anyone who looked enough like him to be alarmed. At least not about THAT, anyway.

Another guy came up and said he thinks we ought to get this guy some help with his illness. So what, we're supposed to call in a psychiatrist? We actually did call the police the other night just for a consultation but since the guy isn't really doing anything illegal there wasn't much of anything he could do.

The other problem is that he's not at all clean and smells pretty bad. We actually have a policy about that, too (we have a policy for nearly everything), but that's another thing I don't really want to confront him about. "Excuse me, sir, I know you're crazy but I noticed that your body odor is disgusting. I'm sorry, but our policy requires you to maintain acceptable bodily hygiene. If you can't do that you will have to leave." Can you imagine THAT encounter? Not only that, but bathing is prohibited in the library as well, so he can't even GET clean in our library.

All the staff is aware of him and basically our approach is to leave him alone unless he starts getting loud, whereupon we will approach him and politely ask, "Is everything all right, sir? Is there anything I can help you with?" We've also taken to disabling the computers next to where he's sitting to reduce his olfactory impact on other customers.

I've noticed that people like him seem to move on after a while, so maybe we'll get lucky and he'll stop coming.